Mongolia

North Korean workers toil in factories and on building sites, kimjongilia flowers bloom at a special exhibition, and a restaurant serves plates of bulgogi as another patriotic song blares from a television. Yet this chilly north Asian capital is not Pyongyang, but Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Just before little Baasanjav Lkhagvadorj was lifted onto a horse for a race across Mongolia's open steppe last week, he asked his father to bless him with a kiss. Minutes later the seven-year-old was killed in a fall, the latest in a rising toll among the country's child jockeys.

Shinzo Abe arrived in the Mongolian capital on Saturday seeking closer trade and diplomatic ties with the mineral-rich nation, a potentially important strategic partner due to its location on China's northern border and diplomatic ties with North Korea.

Rio Tinto Group, based in London and the second-biggest mining company in the world, is discussing the suspension of building to protest at Mongolia's demands for a bigger stake in the project and new mining royalty rates, the sources said.

Once he bestrode his world, lending his name to more museums, streets, monuments and public institutions than any other 20th-century figure. But in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator at least, it is goodbye Lenin as a political dinosaur makes way for the real kind.

Every time a new Mongolian-language edition of Cosmopolitan magazine is released, Tselmeg Erdenkhuu sits down with a friend to explore a monthly dose of Hollywood gossip, glitzy fashion and scintillating sex.

“They talk about sex a lot in this magazine, like what position is healthy or how to make men go crazy,” said the 28-year-old businesswoman, who is a single mother.

Mongolia is still open to foreign investment despite a hastily enacted law that subjects foreign investments to government approval and recent calls by some nationalist politicians to renegotiate the terms of a mega copper mining deal with Rio Tinto, a senior government official said.

T. Nasan-Ish, 50, has just returned from a community meeting in Khanbogd in Mongolia's south Gobi desert. "We have exciting news", he says. "We're expecting to get unlimited electricity in the coming 40 days".

SouthGobi Resources swung to a net loss of US$54.56 million in the third quarter from a net profit of US$55.92 million in the period last year, while the mining firm's revenue plunged 94.5 per cent to US$3.34 million in the quarter.

The Hong Kong arm of a major Australian mining company based in Mongolia has yet to comment on why its senior lawyer is still being questioned by anti-corruption authorities and banned from leaving the country.

It's Friday night at the Grand Khaan Irish Pub and the house band is covering an Eric Clapton song, the waitresses are delivering pints of beer to patrons and thick clouds of cigarette smoke are wafting into the rafters.

The wife of a long-imprisoned ethnic Mongolian activist in China said on Monday that she has spent nearly two years in detention and house arrest on a fabricated charge to silence her family, and that her husband is suffering from depression.